How to reveal NPC´s floor-by-floor indoors.

[flachdrache]

Hi,

iam trying to figure out the best possible approach how to "reveal" (make visible) fighting NPC`s or bot`s in an "RTS" game.

 

Lets assume we have a game like the old fallout (round based with action budged) - some comrades are on ground level but some allready entered the staircase to first-floor.

If we now circle the camera around the building`s center - how to blend-out the building floor-by-floor?

 

The building might be allready separated in groundfloor, groundfloor-walls etc.

so, In LUA i might would load the building floor-by-floor and jump from pivot-to-pivot vertically while using show/hide.

 

How would other, solid ways to handle such look like ?

 

Iam interested in all kinds of ideas.

 

tia, JT

[cocopino]

How odd; I was wondering the same thing a couple of days ago.

 

Two solutions came to mind:

1 - divide your buildings into separate floors. Make the player select the floor that's visible through the gui.

2 - divide your buildings into separate floors. Always make the entire building visible (with roof), except when it has a selected team member on it. In that case, make all floors above the team member's floor invisible.

 

The second is probably nicer if worked out correctly, but a bit more work.

[Rick]

You could put triggers on the stairs or however the characters get from floor to floor that tell the separate floor models what to do. So for example if you have a 5 story building and it has 1 entrance to the 1st floor, you can place 2 triggers at that door. I say 2 because you can check which trigger gets hit first to tell if they are walking into the building or leaving the building. If they are walking into the building that trigger says to hide the other floors above floor 1. Ect for each floor. This works if you just have the 1 character. With multiple characters and switching between them it might not work, unless you store off the last trigger each character hit so you can know which models to show/hide depending on that.

[flachdrache]

thx guys - makes me think of a more cinematic approach iam just playing with atm.

Instead of just hiding stuff top-down, i could track in which area the current alter-ego is and hide whats on the list to be hidden.

Maybe even provide both, a camera pivot for the controller in question for the action sequence and a "outside" iso-perspective for the turns -

way better then my initial idea of a "model viewer".